0 - Note for SectionsState

Interps

Tournament: Dowling | Round: 4 | Opponent: XX | Judge: XXInterpretation: The affirmative must defend the hypothetical implementation of the resolution by the United States federal government.

12/8/18

JF - DA - Climate Change

Tournament: Blake | Round: 2 | Opponent: Minnetonka PB | Judge: NirmalMultilateral climate change solutions are key- the brink is now- Poland talks prove thatHarvey et al 12/12/18 *JUST THIS WEEK Climate change talks lead to renewed pledge to cut emissions EU, Canada, New Zealand and developing countries to keep global warming below 1.5C Fiona Harvey, Ben Doherty and Jonathan Watts in Katowice Wed 12 Dec 2018 15.59 The EU and scores of developing countries have pledged to toughen their existing commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to enable the world to stay within a 1.5C rise in global warming. The promise, which follows increasingly dire scientific warnings, was the most positive message yet to come from the ongoing talks in Poland. The announcement came at the end of a day in which the UN secretary general made an impassioned intervention to rescue the talks, which have been distracted by US, Russian and Saudi moves to downgrade scientific advice. “We’re running out of time,” António Guterres told the plenary. “To waste this opportunity would compromise our last best chance to stop runaway climate change. It would not only be immoral, it would be suicidal.” The talks have centred on devising a rulebook for implementing the 2015 Paris agreement and raising countries’ level of ambition to counter climate change, but progress has been slow on several key issues and divisions have emerged between four fossil fuel powers – the US, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait – and the rest of the world. The UN believes China could play a stronger role in the absence of leadership from the US. Sources said Guterres would make a telephone call to Xi to ask for his help in nudging talks forward. The EU also wants China, which is a key member of the block of 77 developing countries, to step up to ensure that countries all follow the same rules in being transparent over their greenhouse gas emissions. Campaigners praised the decision by the High Ambition Coalition group of countries, made up of the EU and four other developed countries, including Canada and New Zealand, as well as the large grouping of least developed countries and several other developing nations, to scale up their emissions-cutting efforts in line with a 1.5C temperature rise limit. Wendel Trio, director of the Climate Action Network Europe, said: “The spirit of Paris is back. The statement will boost greater ambition at the crunch time of these so far underwhelming talks. For the EU this must mean a commitment to significantly increase its 2030 target by 2020, even beyond the 55 reduction some member states and the European parliament are calling for. We call upon the countries that have not signed the statement so far to stop ignoring the science.” Guterres, in a pointed criticism aimed at the four countries that have been refusing to “welcome” the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s special report on 1.5-degree warming, said rejecting climate science was indefensible. He added: “The IPCC special report is a stark acknowledgment of what the consequences of global warming beyond 1.5 degrees will mean for billions of people around the world, especially those who call small island states home. This is not good news, but we cannot afford to ignore it.” Frank Bainimarama, the prime minister of Fiji and the outgoing chair of COP23, amplified Guterres’ message. He told delegates they risked going down in history as “the generation that blew it – that sacrificed the health of our world and ultimately betrayed humanity because we didn’t have the courage and foresight to go beyond our short-term individual concerns: craven, irresponsible and selfish”. The former US vice-president Al Gore told delegates they faced “the single most important moral choice in history of humanity”. Behind the scenes, delegates said there had been strong progress on finance thanks to a doubling of commitments by Germany and Norway to help poorer nations adapt to climate change and build institutions capable of monitoring emissions. Nicholas Stern, the author of a landmark review on the economics of climate change, praised “the level of ideas and cooperation”. But others said there were still many disputed brackets in the negotiating text on transparency and other elements of the rulebook. “There has been some progress, but it’s a very worrying time. There is still a lot more on the table than we hoped for at this stage,” said Helen Mountford, vice-president of the World Resources Institute. “The secretary general is coming in to make sure this COP can land in a good place. He will hold a summit next year to raise ambitions. If he wants success there, then here we need a robust rulebook and clear signals on ambition and finance.” Janos Pasztor, the former climate adviser to Ban Ki-moon, told the Guardian that Guterres was doing the right thing by intervening at a crucial stage. “He needs to make clear what the IPCC has described as a major challenge, and that we have to deliver on that,” he said. Pasztor added: “We are talking about the need for massive emissions reductions, that have to happen now, not in the future. It is very daunting. The secretary general has reminded the world of what is at stake, and the political significance of that.” The contrasts with the Paris climate summit, in terms of the political atmosphere, were striking. David Levaï, who was part of the French government team that helped to broker the successful 2015 conference, said the geopolitical winds were far less favourable today. Globally, the rise of nationalists such as Donald Trump in the US and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil has tilted power towards fossil fuel and agribusiness interests. He said: “In the year before Paris, all countries made clear that they wanted an agreement. Now, there are repeated attacks on multilateralism, and this has empowered groups that take negative actions.” Levaï, who is at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations, expressed hope that the secretary general might make a difference. “The fact that he has come back shows he feels a need to whip countries into order,” he said. There has been some criticism of the pro-coal government of Poland for failing to press governments to raise their ambitions. But it joined Fiji as co-chair of the Talanoa phase of the negotiations to issue a call for action that recognised the importance of the 1.5C report as the basis for more urgency and ambition. “The window for action is closing fast. We need to do more and we need to do it now,” said the document, which would form part of the official statement from this conference.Democratization efforts fail to unlock climate gridlock- democracies are bound to result in legislative gridlock which results in no action.Burnell 12 Peter Burnell (2012) Democracy, democratization and climate change: complex relationships, Democratization,19:5, 813-842, DOI: 10.1080/13510347.2012.709684 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13510347.2012.709684?scroll=topandneedAccess=trueA commitment to taking climate action does not neatly map onto the distinction between democracies and non-democracies or the distinction between developed and developing countries. Democratization can make it more difficult for countries to engage with climate mitigation. The political incentive structures and other constraints typically facing elected leaders can distract them from long term global goals. Being a wealthy democracy does not guarantee popular commitment to reducing GGEs as a political priority. Whatever other aims democracy might serve, increase in the number of democracies does not seem an obvious solution to global warming especially if democratization actually promotes material economic advance. Democracy seems better structured than non-democracies to protect the rights and basic needs of groups most at risk from climate-induced threats, but democratization alone does not ensure effective climate adaptation. Maybe Walker struck the right note: after reviewing the environmental effects of shifting from top-down to bottom-up approaches to conservation in three democratizing countries in southern Africa he concluded that we should not ask whether democracy is good for the environment but rather how and when democratization in its varying forms makes changes in the structures controlling decision-making and access to material resources favour legitimate social, material and environmental objectives together.74Walker, ‘Democracy and Environment’, 297–8.View all notes The changing global climate is no respecter of the political or economic status of countries, but its effects do differ among them. Some fragile democracies and developing countries that are attempting to democratize may be as or more vulnerable to climate-induced harm than stable authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes. Combining the economic progress needed to meet basic human needs (many millions of Indians lack access to commercial electricity) with climate mitigation and adaptation and with moving towards democracy/consolidating and improving democracy presents enormous challenges. Persuading citizens in established rich democracies to act in accordance with what science says the long-term global public good requires, for example relinquishing cheap-energy intensive life styles, seems an uphill task. Many elected politicians seem reluctant to take it on or prove inept when dealing with the genuine scientific doubts and policy uncertainties. Combating the political influence of organized economic interests that benefit from the status quo is another challenge, almost anywhere. And yet climate change – or the policy response – could precipitate political changes that engulf entire regimes – democracies, non-democracies and aspiring democracies. Even when public pressure for better climate adaptation boosts political liberalization and/or democratization we cannot expect emerging democracies in the developing world to privilege mitigation over economic growth, if the two are thought to conflict. The exceptions would be where popular preferences for material improvement expressed at the ballot box are overridden, or where voters' demands concentrate on human development gains like education and health care that require comparatively little energy.75See UNDP, Human Development Report 2011, 5.View all notes Appropriate international transfers from the rich to poor world could make an important difference where conflicts among objectives arise. Does one overarching question link climate change issues, democracy and democratization? One candidate might be: is it necessary to climate-proof democracy in the democracies and thereby render international efforts to support democratization more resilient in the face of the threats climate change poses? A different candidate asks whether we should now refocus on making the democracies more ‘fit for purpose’ – defined as meeting the main mitigation and adaptation challenges of climate change. That could mean refashioning specific institutional arrangements or even the dominant ideas and models of democracy itself. A strand within green political thinking doubts whether even liberal democracy can provide solutions to environmental issues like climate change; alternatives like deliberative democracy that emphasize public participation are offered in the literature. But even within the confines of liberal democracy institutional tinkering could make a difference. In the United States the political checks and balances handed down by its constitution inclines towards legislative gridlock, impeding decisive action; apparently parliamentary democracies score better on environmental sustainability than presidential democracies.76Ward, ‘Liberal Democracy and Sustainability’, 402.View all notes Perhaps none of the questions in this paragraph should take precedence. But if choices must be made and then implemented the implications for research and practice in respect of democratization, responding to a changing climate, and the future climate, could all be profound.Funding to authoritarian governments is key to effective implementation of climate change policiesGilley 12 Authoritarian environmentalism and China’s response to climate change Bruce Gilley* Division of Political Science, Mark O. Hatfield School of Government, Portland State University, USA Environmental Politics Vol. 21, No. 2, March 2012, 287–307 http://www.web.pdx.edu/~gilleyb/AuthoritarianEnvironmentalism.pdfThe latent concept of authoritarian environmentalism was articulated first by Heilbroner (1974, p. 38) who believed that ‘an absence of inhibitions with respect to the exercise of power’ and limits on the freedom of speech would be needed to control population growth. More recently, the concept was described by Beeson (2010) as having two dimensions. One is a ‘decrease in individual liberty’ that prevents individuals from engaging in unsustainable behaviour and compels them to obey more sustainable policies. The second is a policy process that is dominated by a relatively autonomous central state, affording little or no role for social actors or their representatives (Beeson 2010, pp. 276, 289, 281). Similarly, Shearman and Smith, who, like Beeson, look to East Asian authoritarianism as a model for authoritarian environmentalism, stress limits on individual freedoms as well as a policy process in the exclusive hands of an autonomous state. Like other advocates of authoritarian environment- alism (Wells 2007), they emphasise the importance of excluding business actors as well as other groups from participation, on the basis that they are most opposed to environmental action. They also pay particular attention to the role of scientists and technocrats in steering state policy. In their model, there is limited ‘participation’ by scientific and technocratic elites produced by a ‘Real University’ that instils ‘correct, uncensored, unedited, and scientifically correct knowledge’. But their roles are managed by a wise and uncorrupt state elite, what they term ‘ecoelites’, in charge of formulating and implementing policy (Shearman and Smith 2007, pp. 125–126, 166, 141). Further elaborations have been provided by empirical case studies. Sowers (2007), in her study of nature reserves in Egypt, emphasises the concentration of state authority in executive institutions, which facilitates a rapid formulation and implementation of policies. Doyle and Simpson (2006), meanwhile, show how authoritarian environmentalism in Iran involves the mobilisation of society to support state policies. Thus authoritarian environmentalism can be provisionally defined as a public policy model that concentrates authority in a few executive agencies manned by capable and uncorrupt elites seeking to improve environmental outcomes. Public participation is limited to a narrow cadre of scientific and technocratic elites while others are expected to participate only in state-led mobilisation for the purposes of implementation. The policy outputs that result include a rapid and comprehensive response to the issue and usually some limits on individual freedoms. By implication, then, we can define democratic environmentalism as a public policy model that spreads authority across several levels and agencies of government, including representative legislatures, and that encourages direct public participation from a wide cross-section of society (Holden 2002, Humphrey 2007). Policy outputs may be piecemeal and subject to time lags, and do not generally include restrictions on basic social, civil, or political liberties. Since public participation is at the heart of democratic environmentalism (and its absence at the heart of authoritarian environmentalism), it is important to specify its meaning. Participation involves two dimensions. One is the stage in the policy process where participation takes place, from the upstream stage (research and knowledge formation, problem identification, measurement and assessment, policy options identification and assessment) to the midstream stage (policy selection and formulation) to the downstream stage (policy implementation, leadership, monitoring, reporting, assessment, and revision) (Birkland 2005). The second dimension is the level of participation, from low levels (being targets of state propaganda, reporting policy violations, and attending informational meetings), to medium levels (policy activism and protest, informal consultations), to high levels (legally- binding deliberative forums, outright citizen autonomy, legislative sovereignty) (Arnstein 1969, Plummer and Taylor 2004). Participants may include individual citizens, civil society, the media, issue experts, business leaders and corporations, elected representatives, and social spaces like internet sites and schools (Baum 2004, p. 1840). In practice, all environmental policy models are mixtures of democratic and authoritarian features. Democratic regimes, for instance, usually delegate substantive powers of secondary legislation and regulatory enforcement to bureaucratic agencies that are relatively insulated from participatory pressures. Authoritarian regimes, meanwhile, may have significant informal participation by social elites and may experience dispersed decision-making as a result of the dynamics of factional politics. Nonetheless, as ideal-types, democratic and authoritarian environmentalism are useful in order to compare policy processes in different countries. China accounted for 25 of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2009, up from just 11 in 1990, making it the world’s leading source of greenhouse gas emissions (which are about 80 CO2 in China as elsewhere). By 2030, it will account for about half of global CO2 emissions. China (along with India) is also a country where the absolute impacts of climate change will be greatest: melting Tibetan glaciers, sinking Shanghai, inundating Hong Kong, devastat- ing south coast typhoons, an expected 5–10 decline in agricultural production, and a rapid loss of biodiversity (Lai 2009). Consistent with authoritarian environmentalism, the political response to climate change in China has been centred on the top-down, regulatory powers of the central state. A Climate Change Leadership Group was established within the then-State Council’s Environmental Protection Commission in 1990. In 1998, a multi-agency National Coordination Committee on Climate Change was established and upgraded in 2007 into a 20-ministry National Leading Group to Address Climate Change (NLGACC) (guojia yingdui qihou bianhua lingdao xiaozu). The group is headed by the premier and head- quartered in the ministerial-level National Development and Reform Commission’s (NDRC) Department of Climate Change. The only outside participation comes from a scientific advisory committee, although most of its members are from government-funded or owned research institutes, especially the Energy Research Institute of the NDRC. The policy outputs in China have been rapid and comprehensive since the submission to the leadership of a national energy strategy in 2003 (Chen 2003). The report was taken up by the top leadership in 2004, leading to the promulgation of a National Climate Change Program in 2007 (National Development and Reform Commission 2007). A Renewable Energy Law was completed in 2004 after fewer than nine months of drafting (Tian 2004) and then passed into law with no amendments by the unelected national legislature in 2005. In 2009, Beijing announced a national target of reducing CO2 emissions per unit of gross domestic product (GDP) by 40–45 by 2020 compared with 2005 levels. The 40–45 target resulted from studies conducted within the NDRC (Jiang et al. 2009) and the final decision was made by the ruling party’s Politburo.1 Following the announcement of the target, all agencies of government began issuing extensive implementing legislation, regulations, and circulars dealing with energy conservation, energy efficiency, and renewables as well as climate change mitigation. For instance, under a national ‘energy savings and emissions reductions’ (ESER) policy (jieneng jianpai), environmental autho- rities in coordination with the central bank and financial regulators began blacklisting polluting enterprises from receiving state bank loans or offering new shares (the so-called ‘green credit’ policy) (Wang and Chen 2010). Consideration is also being given to an ‘environmental tax’ on each company’s pollution footprint and to a ‘green export policy’ to sanction polluters engaged in foreign trade (Aizawa and Yang 2010, p. 123). Power cuts to achieve energy reduction targets left 3500 households, as well as schools and hospitals, without indoor heat in one city in central China in early 2011 as temperatures plunged to 7108C (Yan 2011). As to restrictions on liberties, a State Council circular of 2008 ‘required’ that all drivers leave their cars at home at least one day a week; that elevators not be used to reach the first three floors of public buildings; and that public sector employees wear casual clothes to work in the summer (State Council 2008b). Local governments, meanwhile, are under pressure to impose their own rules ‘so that people have no alternative but to adopt a low-carbon lifestyle’ (He 2010b, p. 21). The state’s population control policies have been cited as a model for future limits on individual choices related to climate change (Xinhua News Agency 2009). Warming threatens extinction without a nuclear war and magnifies every other existential risk---it’s an impact filterPhil Torres 16, Affiliate Scholar at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and founder of the X-Risks Institute, 7/22/16, “Op-ed: Climate Change Is the Most Urgent Existential Risk,” https://futureoflife.org/2016/07/22/climate-change-is-the-most-urgent-existential-risk/Climate change and biodiversity loss may pose the most immediate and important threat to human survival given their indirect effects on other risk scenarios. Humanity faces a number of formidable challenges this century. Threats to our collective survival stem from asteroids and comets, supervolcanoes, global pandemics, climate change, biodiversity loss, nuclear weapons, biotechnology, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and artificial superintelligence. With such threats in mind, an informal survey conducted by the Future of Humanity Institute placed the probability of human extinction this century at 19. To put this in perspective, it means that the average American is more than a thousand times more likely to die in a human extinction event than a plane crash.* So, given limited resources, which risks should we prioritize? Many intellectual leaders, including Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates, have suggested that artificial superintelligence constitutes one of the most significant risks to humanity. And this may be correct in the long-term. But I would argue that two other risks, namely climate change and biodiversity loss, should take priority right now over every other known threat. Why? Because these ongoing catastrophes in slow-motion will frame our existential predicament on Earth not just for the rest of this century, but for literally thousands of years to come. As such, they have the capacity to raise or lower the probability of other risks scenarios unfolding. Multiplying Threats Ask yourself the following: are wars more or less likely in a world marked by extreme weather events, megadroughts, food supply disruptions, and sea-level rise? Are terrorist attacks more or less likely in a world beset by the collapse of global ecosystems, agricultural failures, economic uncertainty, and political instability? Both government officials and scientists agree that the answer is “more likely.” For example, the current Director of the CIA, John Brennan, recently identified “the impact of climate change” as one of the “deeper causes of this rising instability” in countries like Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Ukraine. Similarly, the former Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, has described climate change as a “threat multiplier” with “the potential to exacerbate many of the challenges we are dealing with today — from infectious disease to terrorism.” The Department of Defense has also affirmed a connection. In a 2015 report, it states, “Global climate change will aggravate problems such as poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership and weak political institutions that threaten stability in a number of countries.” Scientific studies have further shown a connection between the environmental crisis and violent conflicts. For example, a 2015 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences argues that climate change was a causal factor behind the record-breaking 2007-2010 drought in Syria. This drought led to a mass migration of farmers into urban centers, which fueled the 2011 Syrian civil war. Some observers, including myself, have suggested that this struggle could be the beginning of World War III, given the complex tangle of international involvement and overlapping interests. The study’s conclusion is also significant because the Syrian civil war was the Petri dish in which the Islamic State consolidated its forces, later emerging as the largest and most powerful terrorist organization in human history.

12/14/18

JF - K - QFKJ

Tournament: Blake | Round: 5 | Opponent: Canyon Crest SX | Judge: Nick SmithThey give too much credence to the institutions - The effect of state policies aimed at helping oppressed bodies vanishes in thin air, but the legal walls created stay in place. You are supposedly helping oppressed people in Saudi Arabia which ignores the broader structural question of how the state tells us we passed this one policy for you “why are you not happ”? Only totally reorienting our existence in the state can we ever confront the walls that are constructed. Ahmed 1 (Sara Ahmed is formerly the director of a new Centre for Feminist Research (CFR) at Goldsmiths, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, and a scholar that writes on the intersection of queer theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and post-colonialism/ Ahmed, Sara. Article from her independent research blog: Evidence Posted on July 12, 2016 – no pg. numbers, DOA 1/28/17 GKKE) To have evidence of a policy is not sufficient for the policy to be enacted. In this example the head of human resources removed the decision from the minutes: you can see here how the removal of evidence of something is an attempt to modify an arrangement. However what is being modified is the record of a modification. We learn how stasis can involve work: to keep an old arrangement you remove traces of the policy having been changed. but it was however put back in the minutes. This put back was a result of yet more diversity work: noticing the removal of evidence is evidence of labour. But then: when the practitioner tells her colleagues in meetings that the policy has changed, they look at her “like she is saying something really stupid.” She might as well not have any evidence because as far as they are concerned the policy has not been changed. The story of a diversity policy that does not do anything is a tantalizingly tangible example of what goes on so often. But even if the story makes something tangible (and that it is so is a result of the labour and testimony of a diversity worker – think of how many tales like this are not told), it shows us how some things are reproduced by remaining intangible. This remaining is “stubborn,” a stubbornness that is not dependent upon an individual (although it can involve individuals) but an effect of how things combine. She has evidence; she can point to it; but it is as if she has nothing to show. Diversity work: you learn that intangibility is quite a phenomenon. Intangibility can be the product of institutional resistance. And that is a philosophical as well as political point because it teaches us that what is not evident to the senses is not simply about the status of an object. The object here is not missing or even withdrawn. The object is right there. And it is there because the right procedures have been followed to make it there. An object that has been brought into existence does not appear. Something is not perceived despite being available or near to hand: you can not notice what is right in front of you without having to make any effort to turn away. Paper can disappear because the content of the decision that is recorded on that paper is not in agreement with what has “really” been decided, a decision that takes the form of a momentum; a direction that does not need to made into a directive because it is shared. That a policy can be agreed without being followed teaches us that a policy and a direction are not the same thing. Perhaps changing policies is a way of sustaining a direction, because those appointed to do equality and diversity (and appointments are often made to comply with the law) end up spending their time working on policies that do not do anything. As one practitioner I spoke to once said: “you end up doing the document rather than doing the doing.” Doing the document. Not doing the doing. You can see why diversity workers often talk about walls when they talk about their work. Diversity work is a “banging your head against a brick wall job.” As I commented in an earlier post, what makes an institutional wall even harder is that it is not a concrete or actual wall. If there was a wall there, we could point to it. The wall might then provide evidence of itself: a wall as self-evident. Although, to qualify this (as optimism) we have also learnt something is not always perceived even when it is tangible. What makes an institutional wall harder is that unless you come up against it (because of who you are, or what you are trying to do), this wall does not appear. The walls that diversity workers speak about are assumed as phantom walls: in your head not in the world. Racism and sexism are walls in this sense: in the world but assumed as in our heads not in the world. We have to live with that assumption. In the world. What is a phantom for some for others is real. What is hardest for some does not appear to others. And so: a policy disappears despite there being a paper trail, despite the evidence, or even because of the evidence. People disappear too, because of what they make evident, of what they try to bring into view. There are many ways in which you can end up disappearing. The story I have shared with you is one story of disappearance. And it is not just a policy that disappears in the story. A diversity worker: she ends up exhausted because despite all her efforts the same thing is still happening. Sometimes you stop because it is too hard to get through. So she might leave, or turn her energy toward something else: a new policy, a new document, a new job. And: this practitioner left her post soon after I interviewed her, for another post in another university. What happens to a policy can happen to a person. People disappear too: because of what they try to make evident, what they try to bring into view. What is evident, I implied at the start, is often a weaker sense: something is evident to someone. What is evident: a matter of perception. We are now learning: perception matters. The removal of evidence is an institutional process that renders somethings not evident to those who inhabit that institution. It is as if: nothing is there. No policy, no paper. Maybe a person appears, but you look at her blankly. What is she waving around! What is she going on about! The wall that you come up against, that blocks a progression (of a policy or a person), is not encountered by those who do not come up against it. There; nothing there. No wonder: There becomes despair.Thus, the role of the ballot is to create a queer willfulness archive. Only by lending an ear to marginalized bodies in the institution and making visible its walls. Endorsing the queer killjoy is endorsing our willfulness, our persistence to break through the wall of perception that our deviance from paths of straightness and complacency can be archived on a promise of hope. Every rfd, refutation, and reading of the 1ac/k is a new addition to the collective willful archive. Ahmed 14 (Ahmed, Sara, Sara Ahmed is formerly the director of a new Centre for Feminist Research (CFR) at Goldsmiths, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, and a scholar that writes on the intersection of queer theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and post-colonialism, Willful Subjects Duke University Press, Print, 2014 Pg. 18-21) KAEIn assembling a willfulness archive, I am also working with concepts, and I hope to return concepts to bodies. Concepts can be sweaty: a trace of the laboring of bodies. Willfulness becomes a sweaty concept if we can reveal the labor of its creation.27 If we hear the definition of willfulness, cold and dusty from being lodged in a dictionary, as a call, as an address to someone, we can think of how words and concepts leak into worlds. To recall: “asserting or disposed to assert one’s own will against persuasion, instruction, or command; governed by will without regard to reason; determined to take one’s own way; obstinately self- willed or perverse.” To be called obstinate or perverse because you are not persuaded by the reasoning of others? Is this familiar to you? Have you heard this before? A Willfulness Archive 19 When willfulness is an attribution, a way of finding fault, then willfulness is also the experience of an attribution. Willfulness can be deposited in our bodies. And when willfulness is deposited in our bodies, our bodies become part of a willfulness archive.28 To follow willfulness around thus requires moving out of the history of ideas and into everyday life worlds. If we inherit this history, it leaves an impression on the skin. I could not have worked with these impressions on my own, even if the experience of being called willful can feel like being cast out. I needed the hands of others, virtual and fleshy others, to support my own eff ort to make willfulness the sustained object of theoretical reflection. The book is organized as threads of argument that are woven together and tied up somewhat loosely. I have used echoes and repetitions across the chapters (the same things come up in different places). I have relied on the sound of connection to build up a case from a series of impressions and have thus imagined the writing as poetic as well as academic. This is not to say there is no reason in the rhyme. In structuring this book, my aim has been to thicken gradually my account of the sociality of will. After all, the judgment of willfulness derives from a social scene: how some have their will judged as a problem by others. The first chapter draws on examples of individuals who are “willing together” in actualizing a possibility; the second reflects on how the project of eliminating willfulness from will becomes a moral imperative that is binding; the third reflects on how some wills are generalized in a social or institutional body; and the fourth considers how willfulness is required when you come up against what has been generalized as will. One of my key aims is to explore how the will becomes a question of time by thinking through how will relates to the past as well as the future, and how the will is thus never quite present or in the time we are in: the subjective time of will is thus described as non- spontaneity and the social time of will as non- synchronicity. The question of will becomes a question of precedence, and in the book I explore specific figures including the guest (chapter 1), the child (chapter 2), and the stranger (chapter 3), who can be thought of as sharing a condition: that of coming after. In chapter 1, “Willing Subjects,” I consider willing as an everyday experience and social activity. I explore willing as a project form, as how subjects aim to bring certain things about. I begin in this way to depersonalize willfulness (which as a judgment can often feel too personal, as if it is about a person) by showing how willfulness can be attributed to what ever 20 Introduction gets in the way of an intention, including objects as well as subjects. In chapter 2, “The Good Will,” I return to the figure of the willful child and consider how she becomes a tool in the history of the education of will. The chapter also explores how the will itself becomes a project, as what a subject must work upon, and off ers a critique of the universality of the good will by reflecting on the gendering of the will as well as willfulness. In chapter 3, “The General Will,” I analyze the distinction between will and willfulness as it relates to the distinction between the general and par tic u lar will. I explore how parts that are not willing the preservation of the whole are charged with willfulness, including nonproductive and nonreproductive parts. The book then offers a recharge of the charged term of willfulness by thinking through how we are in this charge. In chapter 4, “Willfulness as a Style of Politics,” I refl ect on how willfulness has been actively claimed. If willfulness involves a conversion point (how a potential is converted into a threat), this chapter explores another conversion point, what we might call a counter- conversion (how a threat can be converted into potential). However, the mood of this chapter is not simply or only celebratory. I reflect on experiences that are difficult and do not wish to resolve that diffi culty (to resolve diffi culty would be to lose proximity to what is diffi cult). In the conclusion if I do celebrate, at least in part, willful parts (perhaps in the original sense of “celebrate” as to frequent in numbers or to crowd), I also acknowledge that willfulness does not provide our action with a moral ground. Being less supported might also mean being willing to travel on unstable grounds even if (or perhaps because) our aim is to fi nd support. In writing about willfulness, I concede the possibility that my own writing will be judged as willful: as too assertive, even pushy. One of my arguments is that some bodies have to push harder than other bodies just to proceed; this argument might be true for arguments as well as bodies. The Oxford English Dictionary (oed) describes the meaning of willful as strong willed “in the positive sense” as both obsolete and rare. The negative senses of willfulness (or even willfulness as a negative sense) have become so deeply entrenched that to open up a history of willfulness one might have to insist on other more positive senses. I might have become rather insistent about the potential of being insistent. Sometimes you might even have to “over- insist” to get through a wall of perception; it is a reflection of what we have to get over. At the same time, I am conscious that a book on willfulness needs willing readers; by which I mean those who are willing to keep reading, to stay with the text, whether or not they agree with it. I have thus taken as much care as I can in how and when I have introduced willful subjects. And I have taken my time; indeed, it is not until the last chapter of this book that I describe the world from their point of view, from the point of view of those who receive and are shaped by this judgment. I use the third person plural here even though I include myself within a willfulness archive. I often address this book in this way, thinking of it in terms of what they are doing. When I came to rewrite it, I wondered whether they would agree. Over time I began to reimagine the project of the book as lending my ear to willful subjects. Although some of the stories of willfulness are individual, the project of the book is collective: it is not only about bringing individual stories together, but hearing each as a thread of a shared history. Strays, when heard together, are noisy. Perhaps the book itself has become plural in being filled with willful subjects. It might even have become like what it has been filled with; willful subjects who insist on their separation, who refuse to be subjected to my own will. Has Willful Subjects become a willful subject? I will answer this question with a firm yes. It is an affirmation that leads me on another willfulness trail. Feminist, queer, and antiracist histories are full of rather willful books. Gloria Anzaldúa describes Borderlands, La Frontera: Th e New Mestiza as follows: “The whole thing has had a mind of its own, escaping me and insisting on putting together the pieces of its own puzzle with minimal direction from my will. It is a rebellious, willful entity, a precocious girl- child forced to grow up too quickly” (1987 1999, 88).29 The book as a “whole thing” can become a willful girl- child, the one who insists on getting her own way, who comes to you with her own explanations of what it is that she is doing. In making this connection between the willful subjects in the book and the book itself, I was becoming a point on the genealogical line of feminist and queer of color scholarship. This line is not a straight but a wayward line, as it must be if we are to find each other in the puzzle of what unfolds. In wandering away we might even reach the same places. As I explore throughout this book, the willful subject is often depicted as a wanderer. When you stray from the official paths, you create desire lines, faint marks on the earth, as traces of where you or others have been.30 A willfulness archive is premised on hope: the hope that those who wander away from the paths they are supposed to follow leave their footprints behind.The idea that “things can get better for queer folk so we should focus on policy actions” has made us complacent in the institution and policies that have masked the underlying oppression. The state passes “radical policies” like the legalization of gay marriage yet this continues to prioritize white gay men and exclude those who don’t fit in that box of the “perfect queer”. Thus I affirm the method of the queer feminist killjoy, coming up against the institutional walls and creating a starting point to transgress themAhmed 17 Sara Ahmed, formerly the director of a new Centre for Feminist Research (CFR) at Goldsmiths, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, and a scholar that writes on the intersection of queer theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and post-colonialism, Living a feminist life, 2017 Duke University Press, pg 230-234I have noted how actions that are small can also become wall. Lesbian feminism might involve small actions. Maybe the chip, chip, chip of hammering can be transformed into a hammer: if he is a chip off the old block, we chip, chip, chip away at that block. Chip, chip, chip, who knows, eventually it might come right off. To persist in chipping at the blocks of heteropatriarchy, we have to become willful. I want to think of lesbian feminism as a willfulness archive, a living and a lively archive made up and made out of our own experiences of struggling against what we come up against, developing some of my arguments from chapter 3. We could begin with the very figure of the lesbian feminist; how willful she is, how striking. She is without question a killjoy figure; so often coming up as being anti, antisex, antifun; antilife. The investment in her misery needs to be understood as just that: an investment. To live out a lesbian life is to become willingly estranged from the causes of happiness. No wonder she causes unhappiness. It is important to note here that the investment in the misery of lesbians can also be detected even within queer studies. In some queer literatures, lesbian feminism itself appears as a miserable scene that we had to get through, or pass through, before we could embrace the happier possibility of becoming queer. For instance, Beatriz Preciado (2012), in a lecture on queer bulldogs, refers to lesbians as ugly with specific reference to lesbian styles, fashions, and haircuts. The lesbian appears as an abject figure we were all surely happy to have left behind, even if she continues to stalk queer talks as a reminder of a failed project. I suspect this reference to the ugliness of lesbians is intended as ironic, even playful. But of course contemporary sexism and homophobia is often ironic and playful. I don’t find it particularly amusing. And indeed what is also noticeable is how this investment in miserable lesbians leads to an erasure of the inventiveness in lesbian histories described in the previous section as a desire to be ordinary in a world in which your desires take you out of the ordinary. The bits and pieces from lesbian histories that are understood as more redeemable (for example, butch / femme as erotic styles or modes of being) become rewritten as a queer history, or a history of how queerness came to be. Of course there were moments in lesbian feminist history when butch and femme were critiqued as imitating the gender system, or when the butch lesbian was herself rendered a pale imitation of a man (moments that exposed the class as well as racial specificity of lesbian ideals); but that was not exhaustive either as a moment or as a critique. Lesbians are not a step on a path that leads in a queer direction. A willful lesbian stone is not a stepping stone. Try stepping on a stone butch and see what happens. More is at stake in lesbian feminism as a politics of willfulness than how the figure of the lesbian feminist is menacing and miserable. Willfulness is also behind us. We can listen to who is behind us. Julia Penelope describes lesbianism as willfulness: “The lesbian stands against the world created by the male imagination. What willfulness we possess when we claim our lives!” (1992, 42, first emphasis mine). Marilyn Frye’s radical feminism uses the adjective willful: “The willful creation of new meaning, new loci of meaning, and new ways of being, together, in the world, seems to me in these mortally dangerous times the best hope we have” (1992, 9). Together these statements are claims to willfulness as a lesbian and radical feminist politics, and I want us to think about the connections between them: willfulness as standing against; willfulness as creativity. When a world does not give us standing, to stand is to stand against that world. And when a world does not give us standing, we have to create other ways of being in the world. You acquire the potential to make things, create things. Lesbian feminism: the actualization of a potential we have to make things. A movement is assembled by those who keep encountering in their everyday life what they stand against. Lesbian feminism is radical feminism (in the sense of feminist at its root) and thus lesbian feminism demands our full involvement; as Marilyn Frye describes, “Bodily energy, ardour, intelligence, vitality” all need “to be available and engaged in the creation of a world for women” (1991, 14). To be engaged in the creation of a world for women is to transform what it means to be women. Let me explain what I mean by this by going back to the words. The history of the word woman teaches us how the categories that secure personhood are bound up with a history of ownership: woman is derived from a compound of wif (wife) and man (human being); woman as wife- man also suggesting woman as female servant. The history of woman is impossible to disentangle from the history of wife: the female human not only as in relation to man but as for man (woman as there for, and therefore, being for). We can make sense of Monique Wittig’s (1992) audacious statement, “Lesbians are not women.” She argues that lesbians are not women because “women” is being in relation to men: for Wittig, “women” is a heterosexual category, or a heterosexual injunction. To become a lesbian is to queer woman by wrestling her away from him. To create a world for women is to cease to be women for. To be a woman with a woman or a woman with women (we do not need to assume a couple form) is to become what Wittig calls an “escapee” or a stray. To be a lesbian is to stray away from the path you are supposed to follow if you are to reach the right destination. To stray is to deviate from the path of happiness. We deviate from the category “women” when we move toward women. Or if a lesbian is a woman, if we wrestle her away from this history, she is a willful woman. Willful woman: how striking! Willful woman: how queer! By holding on to the figure of the lesbian as full of potential, we are not giving up on queer; rather, we are refusing to assume being queer means giving up on lesbian feminism. 4 In chapter 7, I drew on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s discussion of how the potential of queer resides in how it is cleaved to everyday childhood scenes of shame. Queer arrives as an affective inheritance of an insult.5 That queer became an insult directed to sexual minorities refers us back to earlier meanings of queer as odd or strange. The lesbian as a figure might even overinherit queerness: in a heteropatriarchal world there might be nothing odder, or more striking, than women who have as their primary sexual and life partners other women. Lesbians: queer before queer. Lesbian feminism: how revolting! We are revolting against the requirement to be in relation to men; we are revolting against the demand to be female relatives. Lesbian feminism: how we revolt; how we become revolting. The classic piece “Woman Identified Woman” by Radicalesbians thus begins with an explosive speech act: “A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion” (1970, n.p.). This speech act renders the lesbian herself into a tipping point, a breaking point, what I called in the previous chapter feminist snap. She comes to embody the collective rage of women against the requirement to live their lives in relation to men, to become female relatives to the male universal. Such a rage, however, is only part of the story being told; becoming lesbian is an energetic becoming, a re directing of women’s energies away from the labor of maintaining relationships with men as our primary relationships. A lesbian withdraws from a system that requires that she make herself available to men. Many antifeminist as well as antilesbian arguments explain and pathologize her withdrawal. One of the primary ways is through the explanation that lesbianism begins with disappointment; that some women become lesbians because they are not desirable to men; she is understood as a weak substitute, she yet again as not he. She can’t get him so she settles for her.6 The rendering of the lesbian into an abject figure is an orientation device, a way of signaling the danger of not orientating your life as a woman around men. She acquires utility as a reminder of the unhappy consequence of getting things wrong. This statement by Radicalesbians shows exactly how abjection is used as a warning: As long as the label “dyke” can be used to frighten women into a less militant stand, keep her separate from her sisters, keep her from giving primacy to anything other than men and family—then to that extent she is controlled by the male culture. Until women see in each other the possibility of a primal commitment which includes sexual love, they will be denying themselves the love and value they readily accord to men, thus affirming their second- class status. As long as male acceptability is primary—both to individual women and to the movement as a whole—the term lesbian will be used effectively against women. Insofar as women want only more privileges within the system, they do not want to antagonize male power. They instead seek acceptability for women’s liberation, and the most crucial aspect of the acceptability is to deny lesbianism—i.e., to deny any fundamental challenge to the basis of the female. But why is it that women have related to and through men? By virtue of having been brought up in a male society, we have internalized the male culture’s definition of ourselves. That definition consigns us to sexual and family functions, and excludes us from defining and shaping the terms of our lives. (1970, n.p.) The dyke is frightening. To become a dyke is not to be frightened off from militancy. To become a dyke is thus to become militant. She represents a cutoff point. For feminisms that are about becoming acceptable (code: more acceptable to men, or more acceptable to those who are being asked to give up some of their power), lesbians are still unacceptable; lesbianism stands for what is unacceptable; the woman who goes astray is the one who does make becoming acceptable to men her way. Or the work of being lesbian without losing face is the work of becoming as acceptable as one can be, the kind of diversity work I described in chapter 5 as institutional passing. Shiny happy lesbians: you can polish yourself by removing traces of dykes and other more frightening lesbian tendencies. If in becoming woman we have already been directed a certain way, then to become woman in a different way requires a reorientation. To become woman can often mean, in this context, becoming unrelated. It requires work; the effort of redirection, turning away from men as turning the wrong way. At the end of the film A Question of Silence, discussed in chapter 8, we witness this work. When Janine exits the courtroom her husband signals to her to come to him. He beeps the horn of his car, aggressively. I hear that beep as the sound of patriarchy: attend to me; turn to me; listen to me; come back to me. But Janine does not turn to him, return to him; she turns instead toward the other women who have left the room. It is a subtle movement. It is a small step. But it is the beginning of a reorientation. When eventually Janine can turn away from the man who demands her attention, toward other women, it is only because something has already snapped, a bond not only to an individual man as a sexual and life partner, but to the world that makes that bond that which demands the fullness of her attention. Snap is what allows her turning, what allows her to see the women who are already there: right by her side. To identify as lesbian is to turn toward women, which, given the system we live in, requires an active and perpetual turning away from men. In the statement “Woman Identified Woman,” this turning toward women is described in terms of energy. They note, “On one level, which is both personal and political, women may withdraw emotional and sexual energies from men, and work out various alternatives for those energies in their own lives” (Radicalesbians 1970). I think woman identification has been read too quickly as being about gender expression. Woman identification here is about refusing as women to identify with male culture. To refuse to identify is to withdraw your own energy from relationships to men. You often have to become willful to withdraw that energy because you are expected to allocate it that way. Even to withdraw your energy from relationships to men will then be pathologized as hatred of men. This is why the lesbian appears so regularly as a man hater. And this is why woman identification makes woman such a willful subject; she is willful when she is not willing to put her energies into her relationships with men; she is willful by how she redirects her attention. We could reclaim Adrienne Rich’s (1993) somewhat maligned term “lesbian continuum” on similar grounds: not as taking the sex out of lesbianism (by putting friendships between women on the same continuum with sexual relationships) but as a call to redirect our attention.7 To attend to women, we have to unlearn how we have learned to screen women out. We have to learn not to pass over her, just as we have been passed over. It is something to aim for. When you aim not to reproduce a world that directs attention to men, you are threatening. When your being threatens life, you have to wrap life around being. You have to wrap life around being. I would suggest that it is transfeminism today that most recalls the militant spirit of lesbian feminism in part because of the insistence that crafting a life is political work. Transfeminist manifestos carry the baton of radical lesbian manifestos such as “Woman Identified Woman”: from Sandy Stone’s (2006) “The Empire Strikes Back: A Postt ransexual Manifesto” to Julia Serano’s (2007) “Trans Woman Manifesto” and Susan Stryker’s (1994) “My Words to Victor Frankenstein.” These texts assemble a politics from what they name: showing not only how the sex- gender system is coercive, how it restricts what and who can be, but how creativity comes from how we survive a system that we cannot dismantle by the force of our will alone (no matter how willful we are). The monsters will lead the way. Susan Stryker describes how the transsexual appears as monster within some lesbian and gay writing. Rather than distancing herself from this figure, Stryker claims her, becomes her; a proximity initiated as a politics of transgender rage: “Through the operation of rage, the stigma itself becomes the source of transformative power” (1994, 261). Remember, resonance. Abject within feminism Monstrosity When lesbians insisted on speaking within feminist spaces, we were rendered monstrous: think back to Betty Friedan’s description of a lesbian presence as a “lavender menace,” a description that lesbian feminists such as Rita Mae Brown were willing to take up as their own. For Stryker, being willing to be the monster becomes a matter of how you live your life: “May your rage inform your actions and your actions transform you as you struggle to transform your world” (1994, 254). A political struggle can be the struggle to transform your world. It can take willfulness to bring politics back to life. Willfulness might seem to be about an individual subject, as the one who has to become willful just to exist. She matters; to become a subject for some is to become a willful subject. But it is important not to reduce willfulness to individualism, as I have noted previously. We can think here of the character Molly Bolt from Rita Mae Brown’s (1973) classic lesbian novel, Rubyfruit Jungle. It is interesting to note how this novel has been challenged by some critics for its individualism. Kim Emery in her reading of the novel strains hard (in the best way) to be sympathetic. But she notes, “I find it difficult to read Rubyfruit Jungle as being anything other than the simplistic, essentialist, and effectively anti- feminist aggrandizement of American individualism that critics like Bonnie Zimmerman hold it to be” (Emery 2002, 126). Emery in her reading also draws upon Rita Mae Brown’s feisty lesbian feminist text A Plain Brown Rapper, in which Brown (1976, 126) describes woman identification as an ongoing activity, as a persistent practice of selfhood and solidarity. I think reading Molly Bolt through the lens of willfulness allows us to understand that actions that can be diagnosed as individualism provide the basis of lesbian feminist rebellion against social norms and conventions such as the family. When you fight against the family, you are often understood as fighting for yourself. Rebellion is dismissible as individualism. The word willfulness registers this dismissal. I offered a reading of Rubyfruit Jungle in my book The Promise of Happiness (Ahmed 2010) as one instance of the genre of what I called female troublemaker fiction. Somewhat surprisingly (even to myself, looking back) Molly Bolt did not pop up in Willful Subjects (Ahmed 2014), though maybe she lent a hand to the many willful arms that haunted the pages. Molly is appealing. She captures something for us as lesbian readers precisely because of her willful energy: she is too much; she has to be too much, if she is not to be brought down by what she comes up against. It would be easy to dismiss this concern with character as individualism. For those who have to struggle to be, to become an individual is a profoundly communal achievement. It is not surprising that girls who want girls are found to have wills that are wanting. A willful lesbian might be the one who makes bad object choices. A bad choice is when you willingly want the wrong things, the things you are supposed to give up, as well as willfully not wanting the right things, those that would or should secure your happiness. A willful lesbian archive is thus not only an unhappy archive, even though it includes unhappiness. As Elizabeth Freeman suggests, we might be able to glimpse in our archives “historically specific forms of pleasure” that have not been “subsumed into institutional forms” (2005, 66). Molly is not subsumed; her pleasures leak all over the place. She says in response to a question of how many women she has slept with: “Hundreds. I’m irresistible” (200). Rubyfruit Jungle offers us a story of a queer girl who refuses to give up her desires, even if they take her outside the horizon of happiness, even though they get her into trouble. When Molly is brought to the dean’s office after rumors of lesbianism at film college, she is asked by the dean about her problem with girls, and replies: “Dean Marne, I don’t have any problems relating to girls and I’m in love with my roommate. She makes me happy.” Her scraggly red eyebrows with the brown pencil glaring through shot up. “Is this relationship with Faye Raider of an, uh—intimate nature?” “We fuck, if that’s what you’re after.” I think her womb collapsed on that one. Sputtering, she pressed forward. “Don’t you find that somewhat of an aberration? Doesn’t this disturb you, my dear? After all, it’s not normal.” “I know it’s not normal for people in this world to be happy, and I’m happy.” (127) This forced complacency within the institution masks our oppression under the disguise of happiness – we are supposed to be happy as the housewife and the heterosexual. These actions maintain hegemony and become a depletion of the will of the other, skewing out discourse and realities so that is beneficial for the cis straight white man. Ahmed 4 (Sara Ahmed is formerly the director of a new Centre for Feminist Research (CFR) at Goldsmiths, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, and a scholar that writes on the intersection of queer theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and post-colonialism. Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke U Press, 2010. Pg. 63-64 DOA 1/29/17) KMSIt is Sophy’s imagination that threatens to get in the way of her happiness, and thus of the happiness of all. Imagination is what allows girls to question the wisdom they have received and to ask whether what is good for all is necessarily good for them. We could describe one episode of The MiU on the Fhss¶ as Maggie becoming Sophy (or becoming the Sophy that Sophy must be in¶ order to fulfil her narrative function). Maggie has an epiphany: the answer¶ to her troubles is to become happy and good: “ it flashed through her like the¶ suddenly apprehended solution of a problem, that all the miseries of her young¶ life had come from fixing her heart on her own pleasure as if that were the¶ central necessity of the universe" (306). From the point of view of the parents,¶ their daughter has become good because she has submitted to their will:¶ “Her mother felt the change in her with a sort of puzzled wonder that Maggie¶ should be ‘growing up so good'; it was amazing that this once ‘contrairy’ child¶ was becoming so submissive, so backward to assert her own will" (309). To be good as a girl is to give up having a will of one’s own. The mother can thus love the daughter who is becoming like furniture, who can support the family by staying in the background: “The mother was getting fond of her tall, brown¶ girl, the only bit of furniture now in which she could bestow her anxiety and¶ pride” (309). It is as if Maggie has chosen between happiness and life, by giving up life for¶ happiness: ‘“I’ve been a great deal happier,’ she said at last timidly, ‘since I have¶ given up thinking about what is easy and pleasant, and being discontented because¶ I couldn’t have my own will. Our life is determined for us — and it makes the mind very free when we give up wishing and only think of bearing what is laid upon us and doing what is given us to do’” (317). Happiness is associated here with the renunciation of desire.^ It is her friend Philip whom Maggie is¶ addressing at this point. It is Philip who loves Maggie for her aliveness, who gives her books that rekindle her sense of interest and curiosity about the world. He gives her one book that she cannot finish as she reads in this book the injustice of happiness, which is given to some and not others, those deemed worthy of love. “‘I didn’t finish the book,’ said Maggie. ‘As soon as I came to the blond-haired young girl reading in the park, I shut it up and determined to read no further, I foresaw that that light-complexioned girl would win away all the love from Corinne and make her miserable. I’m determined to read no more books where the blondhaired women carry away all the happiness. I should begin to have a prejudice against them. If you could give me some story, now, where the dark woman triumphs, it would restore the balance. I want to avenge Rebecca, and Flora Maclvor, and Minna, and all the rest of the dark unhappy ones’” (348-45). Exercising a racialized vocabulary, Maggie exposes how darkness becomes a form of unhappiness, as lacking the qualities deemed necessary for being given a happy ending.*^ Maggie gives up on giving up her life for happiness by speaking out against the injustice of happiness and how it is given to some and not others. The novel relies on contrasting the cousins Lucy and Maggie in terms of their capacity to be happy and dutiful. Maggie admits her unhappiness to Lucy: “One gets a bad habit of being unhappy” (389). For Lucy, being happy is a way of not being trouble; she cannot live with the reality of getting into trouble: as she says, “I’ve always been happy, I don’t know whether I could bear much trouble” (389). Happiness involves a way of avoiding what one cannot bear. The climactic moment of the novel comes when Stephen, who is betrothed to Lucy, announces his desire for Maggie, who is swept away by it. She almost goes along with him but realizes that she cannot: “Many things are difficult and dark to me, but I see one thing quite clearly: that I must not, cannot, seek my own happiness by sacrificing others” (471). Maggie chooses duty as if without duty there would be only the inclination of the moment. As a good Kantian subject, she says: “If the past is not to bind us, where can duty he? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment” (499), to which Stephen replies, “But it weighs nothing with you that you are robbing me of my happiness” (500-501).*'* By choosing duty, Maggie does not avoid causing unhappiness. She must pay for her moment of transgression. Having deviated from the path of happiness, she has fulfilled her destiny as trouble. As she says in one letter: “Oh God, is there any happiness in love that could make me forget their pain” (528). Death as a result of a natural disaster (a flood) thus liberates Maggie from the unhappy consequences of causing trouble, of deviating from the paths of happiness. The injustice of her loss of life is how the novel speaks against happiness, which itself is narrated as the renunciation of life, imagination, and desire. Even if books like The Mill on the Floss seem to punish their heroines for their transgressions, they also evoke the injustice of happiness, showing what and whom happiness gives up. In giving up on those who seem to give up on happiness, happiness acquires its coherence. We could describe happiness quite simply as a convention, such that to deviate from the paths of happiness is to challenge convention. What is a convention? The word convention comes from the verb “to convene.” To convene is to gather, to assemble, or to meet up, A convention is a point around which we gather. To follow a convention is to gather in the right way, to be assembled. Feminism gives time and space to women’s desires that are not assembled around the reproduction of the family form. Feminists must thus be willing to cause disturbance. Feminists might even have to be willful. A subject would be described as willful at the point that her will does not coincide with that of others, those whose will is reified as the general or social will.*

12/15/18

JF - K - Queer Pess

Tournament: Blake | Round: 4 | Opponent: X | Judge: XQueerness operates outside of the orientation of citizenship. Modern politics is a system of coloniality and procedurally delegitimizes the humanity of black folk, indigenous folk, queer folk, women. The only way for non-citizen queers or immigrants to participate in a democracy is through a politics of disavowal. Removing authoritarian aid will not have us- Queer violence is an acceptable practice and political agenda and thus ostracizes queers from safely participating inside of it. Forcing queer folk to become visible and apparent and operate with hope inside of politics avoids the powerful paradigm of invisibility that they are afforded. Vote neg to mobilize around alienation from the political. Prasad 17 (Pavithra, Outsider Orbits: Disavowal and Dissent in the United States Pavithra Prasad 2017 Michigan State University. Pavithra Prasad, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 4.2 (2017) https://muse.jhu.edu/article/668597/pdf?casa_token=wybFXte0bg0AAAAA:rZRDR0ik2MVw731l54JzZsZG9lSMINDA1DWfGzfEaqCUdgMC5Tf6beQsHxhqbM_URb968C2SjBA pg. 100-107, Web. KE

Over the past year, I had been thinking about what it meant to be a queer South Asian immigrant in the United States. I would become eligible for citizenship in the coming year. I thought about how it would not come soon enough for me to register as a voter. I thought about how at the juncture of my 17th year in the United States, I was just as much non-American as I was non-Indian, having left my country at the age of 17. I thought about how I hadn’t, ever, and couldn’t now, vote even there. As the presidential election unfolded, I thought about how badly I wanted my vote, and how my vote against xenophobia would also mean a vote against the Hindu nationalist rhetoric of ethnic and religious supremacy that informs the current political climate in India and a small but influential segment of the Indian diaspora in the United States. My vote would mean one more step towards realigning Indian American relationality as oppositional to whiteness, not as a chamcha, with a sycophantic longing for approval from whiteness, but becoming minoritarian and racialized alongside other communities of color. W. E. B. Du Bois once lamented, “India has also had temptation to stand apart from the darker peoples and seek her affinities among whites. She has long wished to regard herself as Aryan, rather than ‘colored’ and to think of herself as much nearer physically and spiritually to Germany and England than to Africa, China or the South Seas. And yet, the history of the modern world shows Outsider Orbits ) 101 the futility of this thought.”1 Maria Lugones takes up the illumination of what Du Bois names “the history of the modern world” as coloniality itself; a condition of subjectivity that frames indigenous people, black people, queer people, and women as already outside the realm of the human, and consequently outside the realm of citizenship. Operating within the constructs of coloniality involves a process of legitimizing one’s humanity/citizenship against the nonhumanity/ noncitizenship of others.2 It is no surprise then that anti-black, anti-migrant, and homophobic sensibilities inform orientations towards citizenship within many communities of color. Take, for instance, recent public discourse around the most visible elements of South Asian American involvement in U.S. politics and diasporic perspectives on what it means to be desi (South Asian) in neoliberal frameworks of citizenship. From Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindal to the “Indian-Americans for Trump 2016” PAC, the emergent visibility of South Asia in U.S. politics has taken a decidedly conservative turn in reframing this diasporic community as a model minority at the expense of other brown bodies. The South Asian orientation towards whiteness that Du Bois bemoaned, has not fully been revised, manifesting as anti-Muslim and pro-Trump sentiment in Hindu nationalist India and the diaspora. In a recent essay, anthropologist Stanley Thangaraj describes an October 2016 fundraiser for the Trump campaign organized by the Republican Hindu Coalition in New Jersey. The event combined Bollywood dance performances with the discourse of the “global war on terror” to showcase Hindu Americans as the “good” south Asian American community in opposition to the dangerous Muslims. The audience members arrived and had a seat on chairs adorned with signs saying “Trump for Hindu Americans” and “Trump Great for India.” During one particular skit, when the Hindu characters are attacked by terrorist caricatures (read as Muslim), US “soldiers” (Hindu Americans dressed in combat gear) show up to rescue them with the Stars and Stripes flying the background. Soon thereafter the US national anthem is played.3 Images from this event also showcase placards that promised “Faster Greencards under Trump” and “Make India Great Again,” giving a face to the tenuous promises of riches of the Modi–Trump coalition, which stem from the Islamophobic definitions of citizenship by two powerful nation-states. This discursive and political theatre of loyalty between the two countries is not without its detractors, however, it remains just outside the reach of criticism in order to operate, often to the detriment of its adherents. Increasing attacks on and killings of South Asian men in the United States, reveal just how useless that loyalty is in protecting brown bodies from being persecuted under Islamophobic ideology. 102 ( Pavithra Prasad In my own experience, relationality with other Indians has never come easily. Assimilating to an ideal of Indianness often involves erasing my Tamil identity in the face of North Indian hegemony in the diaspora. Diasporic pathways to citizenship are also frequently wrought through heteronormative familial ties, ties which have been complicated for me, both in India as well as in the United States, as a queer identified woman.4 It is only among other queer people of color that I feel somewhat legible as a racial and sexual minority noncitizen. I am forever at the threshold of minoritarian politics in the United States—as an English speaking, formerly upper-middle-class, immigrant academic from India, I know I am neither a strange presence in academia (since South Asian immigration since 1965 has significantly been tied to the professional class and the university), neither can I fully occupy the disciplinary spaces made for South Asian academics in the Western academy. My work on club cultures, nightlife, and the performance of whiteness in neoliberal India is often a rude party crasher into perceptions of what I probably study as a South Asian performance studies scholar. As a brown, queer, atheist Tamil woman, I am consistently on the margins of South Asian practices of communality in diaspora. Bhagavan, Bhangra, Bollywood, Baaraats are just as alienating as assumptions of heteronormativity that follow my unmarked queerness. I operate as an outsider within systems that extend privileges to me. I operate as an outsider within communities (even queer) in which my belonging is often questioned or made invisible. So, what makes up my community and for whom do I work? I find myself increasingly working for those alienated by the ideologies, representations, and practices that are purported to empower and organize us. Through a sense of unbelonging, people like myself who exist on the margins of experiential race, class, nationality, and sexuality tend to find community with other outsiders. Rather than understanding the outsider as an essentially egotistical position, I offer that the discursive effacement of self, could in fact lead to rhizomatic and virally proliferating organizing in this moment of crisis. Although intersectional identity must remain at the core of how we organize, mobilize, and resist the erasure of difference, it must contend with the fact that it does not keep us bound to each other in a sustainable manner. The critiques and defenses of white feminism at Women’s Marches across the United States stand testament to the erasure of intersectional logic even under the best of intentions. We are repeatedly told to mask our differences if we must mobilize against totalitarianism; that we must fight autocracy with cohesion, political coups with democratic citizenship. But in the weeks that followed the presidential inauguration, we saw something quite different from cohesion. We saw protests against Muslim and national profiling at airports, we saw students railing against a white supremacist speaker at UC-Berkeley, we saw people Outsider Orbits ) 103 preparing for resistance against discriminatory policies of religious freedom that will be used against GLBTQ citizens. We saw, in short, a necessary fragmenting of our shared interests in opposing this administration that seeks exactly this outcome. What the white supremacist presidency aims for is a destabilizing of our collective resistance by weaponizing our intersectional identities against us. What they (and we) may not guess is just how effectively a fragmented opposition can work, rhizomtaically attending to the endless offenses lobbed onto our various communities, moving between them as needed, trusting our numbers to grow even as we reject a homogenizing identitarianism. We are not all women, we are not all immigrants, we are not all queer, but we will show up for women, for citizens, for queers. And we will show up as those who reject belonging to a culture that advocates pogromatic national progress. At the crossroads of intersectionality, perhaps the most recuperative stance to occupy is that of the outsider—choosing transience instead of belonging, orbits instead of homes. I argue that the outsider is uniquely positioned to advocate for others and not for herself, understanding collectivity through individuated accountability and alienation. So that working for justice always means working for justice for someone else. Given these conditions, we might approach queer citizenship as a dead project, in as much as it does not guarantee our rights, safety, or freedoms within the confines of the state. Instead, I brashly stumble forward on a path through the undercommons paved by an empowered alienation from country and ideology. Taking a cue from Stefano Harney and Fred Moten,5 we might consider the impossibility of citizenship as possessable by those who oppose the mechanism by which that very subjectivity emerges. What takes the place of a citizenry could be certain constellations of dissent, which include in various and changing iterations, all of us who disavow the nation-state that classifies through mechanisms of belonging. In place of the citizen, I position the queer outsider as an antidote to the dichotomy of citizen/immigrant. Those outside of the realm of “humanness” must (and already) function as orbital entities that serve as lightning rods for the debates of citizens. Thus, one mode of queer resistance in these times demands that we recognize the position of the outsider as precious and worthy of protection. Queer of color communities have demonstrated this strategy by rallying for precarious queer bodies, rather than demanding they legitimize their insider status by way of sexual behavior or gender presentation. I evoke the term “outsider” to signal a cultural position, as a form of citizenship conceived outside of the norms of legislation, immigration status, or political participation, and which reveals a much more complex ethnoscape of relationality through our unique experiences of alienation under coloniality. 104 ( Pavithra Prasad I weep for instance, at the prospect of applying for legal citizenship under a neofascist regime of xenophobia and increased scrutiny. But, should the duty of the dissenting outsider be to cross into the sphere of inclusion to dismantle it? I can’t begin to presume to have the answers, but when I bear witness to countless undocumented students expressing their fear and anxiety, I am forced instead to ask how their (and to lesser degree, my own) precarity serves as a call to (non)participatory action. What emerges in this moment then is a politics of disavowal as a form of citizenship. Acts of protest against the state by those on the “inside” must be mobilized as a deactivation of their privilege as citizens. This view is not intended to excuse nonparticipation in the rights of citizenship that led to this catastrophe in the first place, rather to ask allies and legal citizens to consider their sense of cultural belonging conditional upon the justice afforded to all people living in relationship to the state. Can the white ally, for instance, commit to feeling the weight of alienation from our movements? Can South Asian immigrants commit to the disavowal of white approval, and bear the weight of brown queer alienation? In a time of necessary divisiveness, mobilizing around protecting precarious cultural citizens, and embracing collective marginality across identifications, can serve as the locus of radical political action.

Citizen/Outsider It has become clear that as a noncitizen, the only option I have in terms of participating in a democracy in which I have no guaranteed rights is to actively participate in a politics of disavowal. This is not my president. This is not my country. India is not my homeland. Desi does not necessarily define my community. Reproducing the familiar narrative of alienation and desire that marks the scholarship on diasporic belonging is not what I intend to do here. Important scholarship already exists on the multiplicity of these experiences and shows us all too clearly that nostalgic heteronormative narratives of home and away are woven through with invisible threads of queer impossibility, interracial intimacies, anti-racist solidarities, and counternationalist postcoloniality. Rather than claiming disavowal as a form of disengagement, I propose that the unsituatedness of the citizen or noncitizen “outsider” can be positioned to disrupt the norming of racial, sexual, and political difference in public discourse. The precarity of the outsider, although terrifying to those who occupy that position, could be a powerful stance from which to reorient public discourse towards justice in a climate where the engulfing of intersectional activism by mainstream Outsider Orbits ) 105 protest practice is not only apparent, but dangerously reproduces the conditions of oppression generated by white supremacy. Patricia Hill Collins’s work on the outsider within reminds us that the position of invisibility affords marginal bodies a view on the paradigms of power that organize relationality in an unequal society. She writes, “Outsiders within, occupy a special place—they become different people, and their difference sensitizes them to patterns that may be more difficult for established sociological insiders to see.”6 Although Collins advocates for operating within dominant structures of power and working to illuminate its fallacies, the outsider I evoke owes a debt to Rosi Braidotti’s illumination of nomadic sensibility7 as one that wanders across realms of identification, and purposefully orbits the core of power in order to connect with the multiplicity of orbits already taking place around it. It is outsiderness with a purpose, a collectivity around affect rather than identity. Likewise, Chela Sandoval wrote about the reality of the differential oppositional consciousness of third-world feminists, who necessarily shift between strategic positions that enable specific political actions, by sublimating a need for static belonging within one or another of our collectives. She writes, “Differential consciousness permits the practitioner to choose tactical positions, that is, to self-consciously break and reform ties to ideology, activities which are imperative for the psychological and political practices that permit the achievement of coalition across differences.”8 In the face of a global rise in political and cultural authoritarianism, strategies of collectivity have failed when political dissent attempts to mobilize around inclusivity rather than alienation, around “shared vision” rather than “shared illegibility.” This is not to blindly critique or rationalize failed collectivity but rather to offer a way forward for radical progressive politics in the current climate of liberal disciplining, tone-policing, and erasure. To disavow is not to disengage. Rather disavowal refocuses collective dissent around affects of otherness, outsiderness, and alienation. It is inherently a position of pacifist action that is informed by affects of rage, contempt, pessimism, and noncooperation. Being in these affects together, grounds outsider activism not around common goals, experiences, beliefs, but around common affects of precarity.9 This is, therefore, a call to mobilize around alienation. In a global moment where our identities are being weaponized against us, our most direct action is to embrace a collectivity around whom we serve, rather than who we are. This is already happening in various ways, in airports, in city centers across the world, in our diverse religious and political communities, and interconnected networks of labor. This is a call to imagine our collectivity as a temporary and responsive relationality that winks in and out of existence, whenever and wherever it is most 106 ( Pavithra Prasad needed. Collectivity looks like nice white ladies showing up at the next Black Lives Matter rally and remaining on the margins; it looks like citizens showing up at immigrant marches without claiming that we are all immigrants; it looks like feminists protecting the rights and dignities of sex workers without needing to save them; it looks like straight allies standing vigil with queer and trans folk without needing to be recognized; it looks like acting for and with communities to which you may never belong. It is accepting that we do not belong to each other. This is a call, not to take back a country, but to dismantle and relaunch it into orbit around a multitude of outsider trajectories that morph, coalesce, and disband in response to each other.Here’s the first impact - heteronormative culture fetishizes anti-queerness. This violence is directed not just at one body but against all queerness - what it means to do violence against that which is nothing.Stanley 11, Eric Stanley, professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California Riverside, "Near Life, Queer Death Overkill and Ontological Capture”, https://queerhistory.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/near-life-queer-death-eric-stanley.pdf, published Summer 2011, accessed 8-2-17 Edina MK.Overkill is a term used to indicate such excessive violence that it pushes a body beyond death. Overkill is often determined by the postmortem removal of body parts, as with the partial decapitation in the case of Lauryn Paige and the dissection of Rashawn Brazell. The temporality of violence, the biological time when the heart stops pushing and pulling blood, yet the killing is not finished, suggests the aim is not simply the end of a specific life, but the ending of all queer life. This is the time of queer death, when the utility of violence gives way to the pleasure in the other’s mortality. If queers, along with others, approximate nothing, then the task of ending, of killing, that which is nothing must go beyond normative times of life and death. In other words, if Lauryn was dead after the first few stab wounds to the throat, then what do the remaining fifty wounds signify? The legal theory that is offered to nullify the practice of overkill often functions under the name of the trans- or gay-panic defense. Both of these defense strategies argue that the murderer became so enraged after the “discovery” of either genitalia or someone’s sexuality they were forced to protect themselves from the threat of queerness. Estanislao Martinez of Fresno, California, used the trans-panic defense and received a four-year prison sentence after admittedly stabbing J. Robles, a Latina transwoman, at least twenty times with a pair of scissors. Importantly, this defense is often used, as in the cases of Robles and Paige, after the murderer has engaged in some kind of sex with the victim. The logic of the trans-panic defense as an explanation for overkill, in its gory semiotics, offers us a way of understanding queers as the nothing of Mbembe’s query. Overkill names the technologies necessary to do away with that which is already gone. Queers then are the specters of life whose threat is so unimaginable that one is “forced,” not simply to murder, but to push them backward out of time, out of History, and into that which comes before. 27 In thinking the overkill of Paige and Brazell, I return to Mbembe’s query, “But what does it mean to do violence to what is nothing?”28 This question in its elegant brutality repeats with each case I offer. By resituating this question in the positive, the “something” that is more often than not translated as the human is made to appear. Of interest here, the category of the human assumes generality, yet can only be activated through the specificity of historical and politically located intersection. To this end, the human, the “something” of this query, within the context of the liberal democracy, names rights-bearing subjects, or those who can stand as subjects before the law. The human, then, makes the nothing not only possible but necessary. Following this logic, the work of death, of the death that is already nothing, not quite human, binds the categorical (mis)recognition of humanity. The human, then, resides in the space of life and under the domain of rights, whereas the queer inhabits the place of compromised personhood and the zone of death. As perpetual and axiomatic threat to the human, the queer is the negated double of the subject of liberal democracy. Understanding the nothing as the unavoidable shadow of the human serves to counter the arguments that suggest overkill and antiqueer violence at large are a pathological break and that the severe nature of these killings signals something extreme. In contrast, overkill is precisely not outside of, but is that which constitutes liberal democracy as such. Overkill then is the proper expression to the riddle of the queer nothingness. Put another way, the spectacular material-semiotics of overkill should not be read as (only) individual pathology; these vicious acts must indict the very social worlds of which they are ambassadors. Overkill is what it means, what it must mean, to do violence to what is nothing. The next impact - their unyielding attachment to the state simply allows its violent machinery to exist peaceably with progressive non-cis-hetero politics – that means the creation and extermination of more violent others and a strengthening of the political economic order.Lamble 14 Sarah Lamble, professor of law at the Birkbeck University of London, "Queer Investments in Punishment" in Queer Necropolitics, pg. 163, published 2014, MKExamining these queer investments in punishment and necropolitics, we can identify several recurring patterns. First, these trends suggest the emergence and expansion of a specifically queer penality. Although punishment is widely endorsed and socially sustained, it appears that LGBT organizations increasingly engage in citizenship claims that are explicitly bound up with punitive norms and values. The popularity of LGBT campaigns for the passage and enforcement of hate crime legislation, with the specific aim of increasing carceral penalties for those convicted, sutures claims of queer safety and freedom to state practices of caging. Second, these trends reconfigure the neoliberal carceral state as the guardian of sexual citizenship rather than the perpetrator of violence. As Haritaworn argues: The redefinition of crime, security, and integration as sexual problems lends an intimate touch to the hard arm of the state. The move of LGBT activism into the penal state enables the police to reinvent themselves as protector, patron, and sponsor of minorities at the very moment that their targeting of racialized populations and areas is reaching new levels. (Haritaworn 2010: 83) In an era of neoliberalism, where faith in the welfare state has been almost abandoned, it is striking how much faith is placed in the carceral state’s capacity to dole out justice, particularly when the state itself has begun to acknowledge the limits of this capacity (Garland 2001). In this context, queer investments in punishment become mechanisms through which the state enlists LGBT subjects as responsibilized partners in the ‘co-production of security’ (Garland 2001: 124) and acquires consent and support for one of its most systemically violent institutions. Whereas law and order politics once belonged more firmly in a right- wing conservative agenda, policing and punishment in these contexts have been transformed into ‘symbols of social inclusion and care for sexual diversity’ (Haritaworn 2010). Third, these processes go hand in hand with the perpetual (re)invention of a dangerous Other, who is easily recognized through older tropes of criminality: the ‘homophobic Muslim’, the ‘working-class yob’ or the ‘backwards immigrant’ (Haritaworn 2010). State recognition of the respectable, enlightened and worthy sexual citizen is thus produced through the reproduction of a dangerous Other who offers a scapegoat for the insecurities and vulnerabilities produced by the contemporary political economic order. The production of these dual figures works to entrench the dividing line between those who are marked for life and vitality and those who are marked for abandonment and death.

Our alternative is Queer Nihilism-A continuous struggle of negativity against every possible form of civil society. Ours is a recognition that there is no space for the queer within the symbolic order and never will be and that the only life worth living is one of inevitable struggle in which we ascribe ourselves to the death drive. There is no perm-we are an embrace of the inherent destruction of society, the 1AC embraces it in some form.Baedan 12 "Baedan." The Anarchist Library. N.p., Summer 2012. Web. 02 Nov. 2016. APPLE VALLRY JOHN BOALSLeftist notions of reform, progress, tolerance, and social justice always come up against the harsh reality that any progressive development can only mean a more sophisticated system of misery and exploitation; that tolerance means nothing; that justice is an impossibility. Activists, progressive and revolutionary alike, will always respond to our critique of the social order with a demand that we articulate some sort of alternative. Let us say once and for all that we have none to offer. Faced with the system’s seamless integration of all positive projects into itself, we can’t afford to affirm or posit any more alternatives for it to consume. Rather we must realize that our task is infinite, not because we have so much to build but because we have an entire world to destroy. Our daily life is so saturated and structured by capital that it is impossible to imagine a life worth living, except one of revolt. We understand destruction to be necessary, and we desire it in abundance. We have nothing to gain through shame or lack of confidence in these desires. There cannot be freedom in the shadow of prisons, there cannot be human community in the context of commodities, there cannot be self-determination under the reign of a state. This world—the police and armies that defend it, the institutions that constitute it, the architecture that gives it shape, the subjectivities that populate it, the apparatuses that administer its function, the schools that inscribe its ideology, the activism that franticly responds to its crises, the arteries of its circulation and flows, the commodities that define life within it, the communication networks that proliferate it, the information technology that surveils and records it—must be annihilated in every instance, all at once. To shy away from this task, to assure our enemies of our good intentions, is the most crass dishonesty. Anarchy, as with queerness, is most powerful in its negative form. Positive conceptions of these, when they are not simply a quiet acquiescence in the face of a sophisticated and evolving totality of domination, are hopelessly trapped in combat with the details of this totality on its own terms.

The role of the ballot is to vote for the debater who best challenges educational futurism – antiqueerness is embedded in education and brackets out any modes of thought outside, which necessitates challenging it.Greteman 14Adam Greteman, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 48, No. 4, 2014, Director of the Masters of Art in Teaching (MAT) Program and Assistant Professor of Art Education at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago (Art Education). MKI touch the future’, Christa McAuliffe said, ‘I teach’. This resonates with educators. By passing on skills, knowledge, and ideas that will be used at later times, they reach out to an unseen future and touch it. Teachers tell their students to study and work hard, for the things they are learning will be needed in the future. The lesson of the day may be applied to a test at the end of the week, or it may be the basis for work that will be carried out at the next grade level. It may even help prepare a student for college, or for a job, or for a fulﬁlling life. Whatever the speciﬁcs, the commonality here is that learning now prepares students for a yet unknown then. Teaching and schooling are suffused with concern about, discussion of, and focus on the future. This theme of futurity carries on beyond school walls and enters political discourse on education. President John F. Kennedy noted, ‘Children are the world’s most valuable resource and its best hope for the future’, while Malcolm X claimed ‘education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today’. But, education is not merely directed toward the future of the individual, but also toward the future of the nation. A Nation at Risk, the oft-quoted 1983 US Department of Education report on the state of American education, tells us that, People are steadfast in their belief that education is the major foundation for the future strength of this country. They even considered education more important than developing the best industrial system or the strongest military force, perhaps because they understood education as the cornerstone of both . . . Very clearly, the public under-stands the primary importance of education as the foundation for a satisfying life, an enlightened and civil society, a strong economy, and a secure Nation (National Commission on Excellence in Education, The Public’s Commitment section, 1983, para. 2) Close to 20 years after the publication of A Nation at Risk, the most sweeping educational reform effort of our time, No Child Left Behind, returned the focus back to the Child, continuing the focus on the future in education and the necessity of the Child to maintain the competitiveness of the nation. As former president George W. Bush asserted in one of his last speeches in ofﬁce, NCLB,. . . starts with this concept: Every child can learn. We believe that it is important to have a high quality education if one is going to succeed in the 21st century. It’s no longer acceptable to be cranking people out of the school system and saying, okay, just go—you know, you can make a living just through manual labor alone. That’s going to happen for some, but it’s not the future of America, if we want to be a competitive nation as we head into the 21st century (Bush, 2009, para.22). And more recently, President Obama, in a speech when he was running for the ofﬁce, asserted, ‘We are the nation that has always understood that our future is inextricably linked to the education of our children’ (Obama,2008, para. 10). Along the same lines, the current Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has stated that, ‘Today, more than ever, better schooling provides a down payment on the nation’s future’(Duncan, 2009, para. 15).Within these statements, the future cannot be separated from those it relies on—predominately ‘children’. These assumptions made in regards to children, their role in the future, and schools’ roles in creating that future are seemingly ingrained in our society and our politics. The presence of this future focus may seem uncontroversial, its inﬂuence benign. Such assumptions may appear to be natural and beyond question, particularly since this futurist-focus originated, in part, with the spread of education during the Enlightenment, with its progress-oriented philosophical perspectives. Yet, we wish to question these assumptions, to explore how they can set narrow boundaries around children in schools. In carrying out this task, we employ the work of Lee Edelman and John Dewey to examine the educational ramiﬁcations of the focus on the future, which we call ‘educational futurism’ after Edelman’s (2004) ‘reproductive futurism’. Our argument seeks speciﬁcally to explore how educational futurism imposes limits on educational discourse and privileges a certain future, thus making it unthinkable to imagine ways outside of such a privileged future. We turn to Edelman for his ‘reproductive futurism’, which is embodied in the regulatory ﬁgure of ‘the Child’, because it is seems particularly apt to the educational settings, practices and discourses which are our concern.

Attachment to the legal system is that falsifies the progress of the queer bodies is a form of cruel optimism, the hope of progress that will never be there, this poses psychological torment on the subject. Berlant 8 (Lauren Berlant, "Cruel Optimism: On Marx, Loss and the Sense", "Optimism and its Objects", http://www.chineseollie.com/didyouread/Berlant-Cruel-Optimism.pdf DV PC

When we talk ... for someone/some group.

Queer violence should be the central question of the debate - the impulse towards extermination is an underlying ominicidal trajectory that guarantees the absolute extermination of all life on earthSedgwick 8 (Eve, Professor of English at Duke University, Epistemology of the Closet, second revised edition, California at Berkeley Press, p. 127-130)

From at least ... opened and opened and opened?

Our alternative is Queer Nihilism-A continuous struggle of negativity against every possible form of civil society. Ours is a recognition that there is no space for the queer within the symbolic order and never will be and that the only life worth living is one of inevitable struggle in which we ascribe ourselves to the death drive. There is no perm-we are an embrace of the inherent destruction of society, the 1AC embraces it in some form.Baedan 12 "Baedan." The Anarchist Library. N.p., Summer 2012. Web. 02 Nov. 2016.Leftist notions of ... its own terms.

The 1AC's acceptance of progress locks political movements into passivity, preventing meaningful change. A Queer methodology is key to inject disruption into these movements to build coalitions strong enough to fight anti-queerness in all its formsCopenhaver 14 (Robert Copenhaver identified as a Queer person of faith, graduate of Idaho State University, whose interests include queer theory, politics, and theology. He will be starting a masters in theological studies at The Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago next fall; "Queer Rage"; published 2/19/14; http://coperoge.wordpress.com/2014/02/19/queer-rage/) KE

I hate straight ... queer bodies everywhere.

Our starting point is uniquely important; we should use the academic setting to facilitate change, rather than roleplaying as policymakers we should take this chance to challenge the heteronormative structures that pervade the Academy. Even if you make some sort of BS argument about how debate isn't educational, we are debating in a school setting so this is a critical site to interrogate heteronormativity thus the role of the ballot is to vote for the debater who best interrogates structural heteronormativity. Elias 03. (John Elias, Professor at San Francisco University) "Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 45, no. 2/3/4, p. 64," 2003 DV PCAkin to organized ... later in this essay.

The aff will always attempt to place you in a position of absolute paranoia; where the only way to do anything is to accept the plan in all instances -- we ask you instead to accept the potential dread that the alternative creates in order to transgress the desire of the affirmative. Berlant and Edelman 14 (Lee, Professor of English at Tufts, Laura, Professor of English at the University of Chicago, "Sex, or the Unbearable," pg 39-41 shr)Dread maps out ... state of loss.

11/3/18

ND - NC - Delib Democracy

Tournament: Apple Valley | Round: 2 | Opponent: | Judge: The value of human freedom is a precondition to all other values, because the act of valuing itself presupposes freedom to value. The sphere of the government is derived from the constitutive force of free agreement from the general will of the population. Such conceptions stem from the natural value of human freedom. Rousseau Rousseau, Jean Jacques. "The Social Contract or Principles of Political Right". 1762. Translated by G.D.H Cole. Constitution ProjectI SUPPOSE men ... most frightful abuse.

If the sovereign does not respect the general will, then they exert power over and above the citizenry and the contract dissolves since something other than the collective contract would govern state action. Rousseau 2 Rousseau, Jean Jacques. "The Social Contract or Principles of Political Right". 1762. Translated by G.D.H Cole. Constitution ProjectI WARN the ... politic would be dissolved.

The value criterion is consistency with procedural democracy

Prefer this value criterion: ethics are created through social interaction and form the basis for identity- only through discourse can we understand the value of life itself.HABERMASJurgen Habermas, Remarks on Discourse Ethics, pg 109-110, 1994, MIT PressSocial interactions mediated ... connected with it.

SO - DA - Cybersecurity

Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 2 | Opponent: McNeil AR | Judge: Rodrigo ParamoUS Cybersecurity is weak - small attacks means the whole grid collapsesBrenner et al 17, Joel Brenner, March 2017m This is the Executive Summary of a series of workshops at MIT lead by Joel Brenner including experts from leading enterprises in each sector, by academic experts in relevant fields, and by a few government officials. Departments involved were MIT Center for International Studies and MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative; KEEPING AMERICA SAFE: TOWARD MORE SECURE NETWORKS FOR CRITICAL SECTORS; https://internetpolicy.mit.edu/reports/Report-IPRI-CIS-CriticalInfrastructure-2017-Brenner.pdf;The digital systems ... back of this report.

Whistleblowers leaks uniquely cause cyber collapse and sparks attacks - NSA proves.Shane 17 Scott Shane, "Security Breach and Spilled Secrets Have Shaken the N.S.A. to Its Core," The New York Times, November 12, 2017.America's largest and ... all but certain.

SO - K - Fem Killjoy

Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 6 | Opponent: Quarry Lane SK | Judge: NadellaThey give too much credence to the institutionAhmed 1 (Sara Ahmed is formerly the director of a new Centre for Feminist Research (CFR) at Goldsmiths, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, and a scholar that writes on the intersection of queer theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and post-colonialism/ Ahmed, Sara. Article from her independent research blog: Evidence Posted on July 12, 2016 - no pg. numbers, DOA 1/28/17To have evidence ... There becomes despair.

Scenarios of nuclear war or extinction are deemed as the 'good form of debate' and help construct a space where violence against womxn is especially hidden and force female debaters to be complacent reading those positions. We are supposed to be nice debaters, more compelling, appropriate and sweet. Failure to do so creates more affect against the marginalized female body. Feminine participation and speech inside debate is constantly suppressed through justifications of conformity and acting "happy". Thus, the figure of the killjoy is uniquely good in debate. Bjork 92 (Rebecca, debater and university coach, "Symposium: Women in Debate: Reflections on the Ongoing Struggle", Effluents and affluence: The Global Pollution Debate, 1992")While reflecting on ... that we have.

When a woman breaks story she's accused of using sex to gain her information - male journalists are noble to resist the government whereas woman are accused of making it all up. Poisonous, promiscuous - the aff's promise to ensure reporters right to project sources ensures these paternalistic stereotypes that female journalists are untrustworthy, abrasive, and overly emotional.Gilbert 18. Sophie Gilbert. "The Lazy Trope of the Unethical Female Journalist" The Atlantic. August 20, 2018. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/08/sharp-objects-female-journalists-in-culture/567898// KMSJokes aside, fictional ... a feminist perspective.

I stand in affirmation of the enactment of the feminist killjoy, calling into question the preconceived notions of what women "should be" and creating a starting point for women and other marginalized groups to be included in our conversations. This is uniquely key in the context of journalism, where attempts to engage in the structures of the journalist system leave women in paradoxical damned if you damned if you don't situations that always conclude with shut up and be happy. Ahmed 10 (Sara Ahmed. "Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects). The Barnard Center for Research on Women - the Scholar and Feminist Online. Issue 8.3. Summer 2010) To be unseated ... they get associated.

These actions maintain hegemony and become a depletion of will for the Other. White patriarchy relies on this promise of happiness. Oppression becomes happiness with circulated images of the happy woman in the kitchen, the thankful woman with lower pay and the happy slave. Happiness requires that the Other renounce desire and will to become complacent with death.Ahmed 4 (Sara Ahmed is formerly the director of a new Centre for Feminist Research (CFR) at Goldsmiths, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, and a scholar that writes on the intersection of queer theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and post-colonialism. Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke U Press, 2010. Pg. 63-64 DOA 1/29/17 KE)It is Sophy's ... or social will.*

This narrative resistance should not continue to only happen behind closed doors. Rather the strategic use of public spaces and rhetoric remapping the 1AC employs is necessary for illuminating patriarchal myths that justify and normalize violence against feminine performing subjects thus the role of the ballot is to endorse radical feminist perspectivism as a critique of dominant discourse Laware 4 Margaret L. Laware, assistant professor in the Department of English and Speech Communication at Iowa State University, "Circling the Missilzs and Staining Them Red: Feminist Rhetorical Invention and Strategies of Resistance at the Women's Peace Camp at Greenham Common", NWSA Journal 16.3 (2004) 18-4, http://muse.jhu.edu.go.libproxy.wakehealth.edu/journals/nwsa_journal/v016/16.3laware.htmlFurther by turning ... resist the social End Page 25

9/16/18

SO - K - Queer Killjoy

Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 6 | Opponent: Quarry Lane SK | Judge: NadellaSocial systems are premised on bodies' placements within systems of meaning. Comfort is when certain subjects fit in with dominant discursive norms. Heteronormativity relies on a repetition of norms to comfort heterosexual subjects. These repetitions transform and dominate spaces for the heterosexual subject to easily exercise its will. Because queers exist at the margin, they are always positioned as anti-normative and uncomfortable.Ahmed 04 Sara Ahmed is formerly the director of a new Centre for Feminist Research (CFR) at Goldsmiths, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, and a scholar that writes on the intersection of queer theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and post-colonialism, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, "The Contingency of Pain", 2004, Routledge, New York, pp 31-34 Accessed 9/15/16. page 176-179 Thinking about comfort ... relation to others.

The idea that "things can get better for queer folk so we should focus on policy actions" has made us complacent in the institution and policies that have masked the underlying oppression. The state passes "radical policies" like the legalization of gay marriage yet this continues to prioritize white gay men and exclude those who don't fit in that box of the "perfect queer". Thus I affirm the method of the queer feminist killjoy, coming up against the institutional walls and creating a starting point to transgress themAhmed 17 Sara Ahmed, formerly the director of a new Centre for Feminist Research (CFR) at Goldsmiths, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, and a scholar that writes on the intersection of queer theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and post-colonialism, Living a feminist life, 2017 Duke University Press, pg 230-234I have noted ... and I'm happy." (127)

Thus, the role of the ballot is to create a queer willfulness archive. Only by lending an ear to marginalized bodies in the institution and making visible its walls. Endorsing the queer killjoy is endorsing our willfulness, our persistence to break through the wall of perception that our deviance from paths of straightness and complacency can be archived on a promise of hope. Every rfd, refutation, and reading of the 1ac/k is a new addition to the collective willful archive. Ahmed 14 (Ahmed, Sara, Sara Ahmed is formerly the director of a new Centre for Feminist Research (CFR) at Goldsmiths, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, and a scholar that writes on the intersection of queer theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and post-colonialism, Willful Subjects Duke University Press, Print, 2014 Pg. 18-21)In assembling a ... their footprints behind.

Ahmed recognizes that not everyone can speak out - the killjoy encompasses a lot of different forms of engagementAhmed 17 Sara Ahmed "Introduction to Killjoys@Work Panel, March 14, Cambridge" Published on feministkilljoys.com on March 28, 2017 https://feministkilljoys.comWhy the killjoy ... not take it anymore.

9/16/18

SO - T - Reporters

Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 2 | Opponent: McNeil AR | Judge: Rodrigo ParamoInterpretation: On the September-October 2018 LD topic, aff debaters must defend that reporters are, according to Cambridge Dictionary, "a person whose job is to discover information about news events and describe them for a newspaper or magazine or for radio or television"

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